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This is how we beat SEJ and Yoast in SEO

This is what we learned by beating the strongest players in our niche, namely, Search Engine Journal and Yoast in a search term that in theory should be impossible for us to top - "SEO word count"

The best part comes here: You can do the same!

Here's how we did it:

To be able to beat such a tough competition, it requires that your content is quality.

  1. By quality, I mean original data that you have found out yourself (feel free to use scientific articles to back you up).
  2. Adding graphics, video, and other content that supports your findings.
  3. Make use of numbers, percentages, or other easily understandable data that is also easy for Google to understand and display in the SERP.

And the most important thing comes here -> Build some highly relevant backlinks that can support your content.
As you can see in the picture there are not hundreds of links a handful is probably enough as long as it has a high Link Relevance Score.

screenshot from ahrefs

Of course, we used Tabtimize's own platform to find and reach out to the pages that are most relevant to our post otherwise it will have taken us days to find the most suitable backlink candidates to support exactly the intent we wanted to rank for.

The result of this is as you can see, not just rank # 1 but a featured snippet and that position we have held for over 2 months now.

Let me know if you did something similar and how you did it.

  1. 2

    That's an inspiring story, well done! Indeed, quality content and backlinks are essential. I'm currently working on content ideas based on our most performant keywords. Any tips on building strong backlinks?

    1. 2

      To be completely, completely honest with you, it's either cold outreach, buying $150+ per link, or use a tool like Tabtimize (which will save you 99% of your time). Unfortunately, there are no "quick hacks" if you do not want to compromise on quality. Ultimately, the alternative may be to reach out to your network and or promote on your already established communication channels to hope for somebody to find your content linkable.

  2. 1

    Congrats! Tabtimize looks great...FWIW - I tried signing up for the beta and clicking the last button doesn't seem to work to sign up.

    1. 1

      Really, what happened? It should send you to a captcha page which will then verify your registration.

      1. 1

        The "add me to the waiting list" button doesn't do anything

        1. 1

          Strange. We have tried on different browsers, mac and windows, mobile and laptop and there is no problem for us at least.

          I would very much like to add you to the list manually if I have your permission to do so?

          1. 1

            I noticed that after clicking the button a message about new window open being blocked is briefly displayed (at least in Firefox). When I let Firefox open new window for that website, the screen with captcha appeared.

            1. 1

              Thanks for the feedback. This has haunted me for several hours now. I went through our analytics and could see about 25% bounce after entering information and thought it was a reasonably high percentage just for a captcha, but if it's because the window gets blocked then it makes more sense. Thank you so much for that Konrad!

          2. 1

            Sure that'd be great - info {at] soundssphere.com

            1. 1

              Great thanks. BTW I love the concept behind soundssphere! I would definitely recommend it to a few acquaintances who I think could benefit from your platform.

              1. 1

                Oh awesome - thank you! Would be happy to chat any time if you have feedback.

                1. 1

                  Definitely and you too :-D

  3. 1

    Interesting, tell me more about the link building part. How does your tool work exactly?

    1. 1

      Yes, sure Andrea.

      An analysis is first made of the textual content of your pages. Then your pages are matched with other contextually relevant pages in our index, based on the match the degree of relevance (Link Relevance Score) is calculated, which can be used to quickly sort between high/low relevant pages.
      Each link opportunity owned by a user can then be requested for a link, where the platform also provides suggestions for relevant anchor texts from existing sentences in the content. All the contextual data is presented so that you can quickly review the relevance, which eliminates the need for a pitch and makes it easy to link between the two pages.
      The entire link management process is automatically tracked and updated on the platform, so you easily can keep track of your campaigns.

      Hope it made sense (still practicing to keep it short).

      1. 1

        Got it, so basically your tool suggests the best websites that could potentially be interested in linking out to my page. I'll still have to come up with a creative pitch to convince them to do it.

        1. 1

          Yes for those who are not users you should try to outreach yourself. Our goal is of course to be able to make the community as versatile as possible, so there are plenty of link opportunities you can request directly from the platform.

      2. 1

        Can you elaborate on your index? Specifically, verifying that it's not a PBN (or multiple PBNs)?

        1. 1

          It is not a PBN, in fact, we are already far in the development of an algorithm that will flag pages in our index which could be possible PBNs, and hopefully with ML sort these sites from automatically.

          We have a spider that finds and crawls pages (we have a little over 3 billion pages ready to be analyzed and indexed), we insert URLs ourselves and users' URLs are crawled as they register their websites.

          So we analyze pages, match them with other relevant pages, and present them as relevant link opportunities, as well as giving you the opportunity to reach out to other users to request a link as your pages are relevant to each other. We do not own any of the sites, only our users do and it is only the users who decide who they want to link to and from, we just make the technology and platform available and to make the process as streamlined as possible for you guys.

          Hope it gave you more clarity, otherwise, let me know.

  4. 1

    This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

  5. 1

    That's sound advice and information. A year ago, I was told that you had to have "content clusters" 5 articles - 1x 2500 words, 4x 1000 words with 70+ keywords in order to rank high in SERP. It was a total disaster for a variety of reasons.

    1. 1

      At first glance, it sounds reasonable, but there is just one thing missing in the equation and that is the topic ecosystem. Each topic has its own ecosystem, which means that rules of thumb like the one you have been told vary by topic's SERP

      The way we see things (from an NLP perspective), the machine can only give a certain number of "confidence levels" to a topic and if you have a page written about different topics with many different keywords, the uniqueness of each topic is washed out and an equally specific dominance cannot be achieved in the text which is also reflected in the rankings. However, there is an exception and it is especially when it comes to sites that already have a certain authority in the topic(s) and have lots of strength from other sites they can direct with.

      1. 1

        For us, these were all related to our main topic - credit monitoring. So it would've been things that would touch on relevant concepts: credit system, scoring, score factors, insurance, fraud, recovering, restoring etc.

        The problem #1 was that they turned on a setting in WordPress to prevent crawling the website. #2 was related to not posting with months and dates in the urls which wound up orphaning half our content, #3 was they used robots.txt to prevent crawling. So because of all of these issues, we lost most of our organic traffic. For some reason, even after fixing these issues, the keywords never got crawled or indexed and our site has never really recovered that lost traffic.

        1. 1

          holy moly, great challenges it sounds. Strange that it has not come back after you have changed it. Have you built backlinks from pages with organic traffic to boost the indexing?

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